Futures market: Wall Street’s thirst for water

International Journal Of Science – Early last year, I published an article in Foreign Policy that explained how Wall Street profits from hunger. I traced the history of financial markets in food and noted how the prices of maize (corn), soya, rice and wheat had broken records three times in the past five years1. I examined the impacts of climate change and biofuel mandates on the grain futures markets, and argued that a global food-pricing system that once benefited farmers, bakers and consumers had been undermined by financial derivatives created by investment banks.

These commodity index funds effectively destroyed the traditional ‘price discovery’ function of the grain futures exchanges in Chicago, Kansas City and Minneapolis, and turned these markets into profit engines for banks and hedge funds while driving up the price of our daily bread.